Over the weekend it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica improperly gained access to the personal data of 50 million Facebook users and used that data to target ads for Trump during the 2016 campaign. This is no little matter as the digital advertising program of the Trump campaign was a significant contributor to their win.
The response of Facebook, though, has been crickets. Late Monday afternoon an NPR reporter at Facebook headquarters was reporting that they had essentially said nothing.
Apparently what happened was that 275,000 Facebook users downloaded an app that said it would do a personality assessment of them. Buried in the user agreement for the app was a section authoring the app developer to also access information about the users’ Facebook connections. Those connections were how the app had information on 50 million people, and Cambridge Analytica used access to the app to get all of that data.
The quiet reaction of a few at Facebook has been that they didn’t do anything wrong. The people who downloaded the app agreed to have their connection data accessed.
But the 49,725,000 connections didn’t agree to that.
This silence and niggling over details is the opposite of what a company should do in a crisis. Since the Tylenol crisis of the 1982, when containers were tampered with and people died, the crisis playbook has been to do what Johnson & Johnson did then: be totally transparent and act quickly to fix the problem. Johnson & Johnson was not responsible for the tampering, but they immediately recalled all Tylenol and added tamper-proof seals to each container. Other drug makers followed their lead.
The current situation, of course, may go beyond being a mere PR problem. Facebook may share some of the responsibility for the problem in a way that J&J did not.
Nonetheless, Facebook is only making matters worse with its silence.
